Honestly, I'd rather gargle draino than think about my loans if I stick with it another 6-8 quarters for my BS degree; I think it might be smarter spending investing in certification training on my own, but I'd like to have a leg up from all the other starting position applicants when I ultimately do get into the field.

So, the question is, tough it up, gargle draino and stick with the BS program, or bail, settle with AS & tackle one certification at a time?

Any of you with a BS end up doing helpdesk or something you're overqualified for? I have informal experience but i'd really like to get into the field. Time is a great enemy

i have 2 semesters left in my comp sci degree, and felt the same as you up until the beginning of my junior year. you're already most of the way done with the degree, why waste all the money you've already spent on it? i think it would be more worthwhile to finish the degree and at least get the piece of paper to put on your wall, then do some extra certifications if you want.

i learned just about nothing my first 2 years in school (partly because i had taken programming for 2 years in high school, and the AP course was pretty good there), so i pretty much taught myself as much as i could in my spare time. buy some books on subjects you want to learn more in depth, stick with the degree you're almost done with getting, then get some certifications to give yourself an extra leg up on everybody who only has a degree. seems like the best course of action to me

You'll be lucky to get anything beyond help desk with an AS and assorted certs.

Oh, and I barely learned anything for my entire 6 years of college. I taught myself to program in basic at 8 years old and in C++ at 12, I had written my first 3D game using the various DirectX API's when I was 14, at around that time I was utilizing methods such as recursion and complex ADT's such as BSP trees in my programs. Shortly after I began writing with a full OO methodology, using abstract base classes with pure virtual functions to allow me to "lump" all of the elements of my prorgrams into the same structures so they can be handled in a very simple, uniform way. I won several local/regional programming competitions in high school, etc etc.

The only things I did learn were related to the formal practices of software engineering, which I consider marginally important at best (it almost seems like guidelines for bad programmers to not be such bad programmers more than anything else). That and I learned a little in my algorithms course, Dijkstra's algorithm for example, but nothing you can't learn with a google search honestly.

You'll be lucky to get anything beyond help desk with an AS and assorted certs.

Oh, and I barely learned anything for my entire 6 years of college. I taught myself to program in basic at 8 years old and in C++ at 12, I had written my first 3D game using the various DirectX API's when I was 14, at around that time I was utilizing methods such as recursion and complex ADT's such as BSP trees in my programs. Shortly after I began writing with a full OO methodology, using abstract base classes with pure virtual functions to allow me to "lump" all of the elements of my prorgrams into the same structures so they can be handled in a very simple, uniform way. I won several local/regional programming competitions in high school, etc etc.

The only things I did learn were related to the formal practices of software engineering, which I consider marginally important at best (it almost seems like guidelines for bad programmers to not be such bad programmers more than anything else). That and I learned a little in my algorithms course, Dijkstra's algorithm for example, but nothing you can't learn with a google search honestly.

i have 2 semesters left in my comp sci degree, and felt the same as you up until the beginning of my junior year. you're already most of the way done with the degree, why waste all the money you've already spent on it? i think it would be more worthwhile to finish the degree and at least get the piece of paper to put on your wall, then do some extra certifications if you want.

i learned just about nothing my first 2 years in school (partly because i had taken programming for 2 years in high school, and the AP course was pretty good there), so i pretty much taught myself as much as i could in my spare time. buy some books on subjects you want to learn more in depth, stick with the degree you're almost done with getting, then get some certifications to give yourself an extra leg up on everybody who only has a degree. seems like the best course of action to me

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the debate is not over the AS, I'll be done with that in september for sure. It's whether shelling out for a BS is worth it in the long run. My professor told me microsoft will eventually discontinue MCSE's and have a new set of certs to obtain anyway. The bachelor's program is pretty substantial, it's alot of work, time and money, so it needs to actually benefit me whether it be a starting pay jump or actual certification training, or whatever.

Codex is pretty much right though, what the fuck kind of position would I start in with no official experience and no formal training, just certifications? It'll likely just get my resume overlooked by an employer.

Ps. I don't think a BS = overqualified for helpdesk. If you don't have any experience, the BS won't get you too far in IT. You'll have more earning potential long-term, but you still need to start at the bottom, most likely.

What certs are you considering? Do you have any experience at all? If you want to end up in management, go with the BS. If you want to specialize in something and get the necessary experience/certs, then the lack of a BS probably won't hurt you too much.

Ps. I don't think a BS = overqualified for helpdesk. If you don't have any experience, the BS won't get you too far in IT. You'll have more earning potential long-term, but you still need to start at the bottom, most likely.

What certs are you considering? Do you have any experience at all? If you want to end up in management, go with the BS. If you want to specialize in something and get the necessary experience/certs, then the lack of a BS probably won't hurt you too much.

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I plan on doing A+, MCSA, Security+, Network+, server+, and linux. I'm just upset that I'll be 23 in april, been in school since HS and have absolutely nothing to show for it, i've just been helping people small-time for years. I want to get into the field, but if it means being at helpdesk than I'm sure the better option is to just stick with the BS program.

I plan on doing A+, MCSA, Network+, server+, and linux. I'm just upset that I'll be 23 in april, been in school since HS and have absolutely nothing to show for it, i've just been helping people small-time for years. I want to get into the field, but if it means being at helpdesk than I'm sure the better option is to just stick with the BS program.

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The problem is you'll likely end up at the helpdesk even with the BS if you don't have any experience (on paper). You could always get an entry level job now while you're working on the BS, or maybe an internship of some kind.

See, you just don't understand... go take a course on operating systems, and computer architecture.

The memory that is being used has NOTHING to do with memory being cheap and programmers being inefficient

Let me try to explain better. Memory is a giant array of tiny little electrical circuits called latches... each of these latches can be in on of two states, charged or discharged. These two states equate to 1's and 0's in binary code. Most systems are word addressable with a typical word size of 2 bytes, or 16 bits.... That means the smallest amount of memory you can manipulate at one time is 16 adjacent bits.

Now... the state of these bits is entirely arbitrary... as in it matters not if they are charged or discharched. When you close a program, you probably think that the memory the program was using is freed, and you would be correct. However, the actual state of the latches, the bits, in the memory array is unchanged. The data that the program that you closed was using remains after you close it. The operating system memory management code simply remembers that this memory is not being used and is "free" for future use...

All that vista does is keep your most used programs in ram... if you start one of them up they load instantly, because the long load time comes from the slow transfer of data and code from the hard disk to memory. If you don't start one of the "cached" programs and start another one and your memory is full, it simply writes over the cache, no harm no foul, and most importantly no performance hit. This system is 100% beneficial with no negative side effects. Either you start one of your most used programs instantly and make use of the cached data, increasing performance, or you start some other uncached application and it has to load it from the disk anyway, as it would in any other operating system. So you see, the amount of reported memory use is including this cached data, however it can be said that this memory simultaneously exists in both a utilized AND free state.

There is NO reason NOT to utilize memory, it makes NO difference what data exists in it. There is absolutely no utility in declaring memory free and compeletely ignoring the data that exists there, as other OS's do.

Oh, and I barely learned anything for my entire 6 years of college. (goes on to explain this in depth)

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You may not like what I said, or how I said it, but to claim it was irrelevant or off topic is ignorant. I was directly responding to the fact that the OP is disillusioned by the fact that he hasn't yet learned anything with an anecdote from my own experience.

I am sorry if you guys think that what I wrote was to "tell you awesome I am"... which is funny because it was nothing of the sort in fact everything I posted is extremely rudimentary and anyone in school for comp. sci. should feel they are on par with the knowledge I expressed in that post.

I was doing nothing more than relating to the OP and validating his feelings by letting him know that he is not alone and that I think almost everyone who goes to school for a technical degree feels the same way, that they don't actually learn much that they didn't already know or couldn't easily figure out for themselves quickly.

See, you just don't understand... go take a course on operating systems, and computer architecture.

The memory that is being used has NOTHING to do with memory being cheap and programmers being inefficient

Let me try to explain better. Memory is a giant array of tiny little electrical circuits called latches... each of these latches can be in on of two states, charged or discharged. These two states equate to 1's and 0's in binary code. Most systems are word addressable with a typical word size of 2 bytes, or 16 bits.... That means the smallest amount of memory you can manipulate at one time is 16 adjacent bits.

Now... the state of these bits is entirely arbitrary... as in it matters not if they are charged or discharched. When you close a program, you probably think that the memory the program was using is freed, and you would be correct. However, the actual state of the latches, the bits, in the memory array is unchanged. The data that the program that you closed was using remains after you close it. The operating system memory management code simply remembers that this memory is not being used and is "free" for future use...

All that vista does is keep your most used programs in ram... if you start one of them up they load instantly, because the long load time comes from the slow transfer of data and code from the hard disk to memory. If you don't start one of the "cached" programs and start another one and your memory is full, it simply writes over the cache, no harm no foul, and most importantly no performance hit. This system is 100% beneficial with no negative side effects. Either you start one of your most used programs instantly and make use of the cached data, increasing performance, or you start some other uncached application and it has to load it from the disk anyway, as it would in any other operating system. So you see, the amount of reported memory use is including this cached data, however it can be said that this memory simultaneously exists in both a utilized AND free state.

There is NO reason NOT to utilize memory, it makes NO difference what data exists in it. There is absolutely no utility in declaring memory free and compeletely ignoring the data that exists there, as other OS's do.

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I don't understand... I posted this in a thread where people were criticizing vista for using what seems like a ton of memory for no reason, it is all accurate and was relevant to the topic it was posted in. Why you are posting it here, out of context, and as if you wrote it is beyond me

You may not like what I said, or how I said it, but to claim it was irrelevant or off topic is ignorant. I was directly responding to the fact that the OP is disillusioned by the fact that he hasn't yet learned anything with an anecdote from my own experience.

I am sorry if you guys think that what I wrote was to "tell you awesome I am"... which is funny because it was nothing of the sort in fact everything I posted is extremely rudimentary and anyone in school for comp. sci. should feel they are on par with the knowledge I expressed in that post.

I was doing nothing more than relating to the OP and validating his feelings by letting him know that he is not alone and that I think almost everyone who goes to school for a technical degree feels the same way, that they don't actually learn much that they didn't already know or couldn't easily figure out for themselves quickly.

Oh, and I barely learned anything for my entire 6 years of college. I taught myself to program in basic at 8 years old and in C++ at 12, I had written my first 3D game using the various DirectX API's when I was 14, at around that time I was utilizing methods such as recursion and complex ADT's such as BSP trees in my programs. Shortly after I began writing with a full OO methodology, using abstract base classes with pure virtual functions to allow me to "lump" all of the elements of my prorgrams into the same structures so they can be handled in a very simple, uniform way. I won several local/regional programming competitions in high school, etc etc.

wow I didn't expect people to get so jealous over a few quick examples explaining why I didn't learn anything in school that were only posted to show the original poster that he is not alone in feeling this way...

Honestly nothing that I posted is anything to brag about, and I wasn't... the fact that you guys think it was says something about you though, that even simple concepts seem so advanced to you that you consider it bragging or something lol

You may not like what I said, or how I said it, but to claim it was irrelevant or off topic is ignorant. I was directly responding to the fact that the OP is disillusioned by the fact that he hasn't yet learned anything with an anecdote from my own experience.

I am sorry if you guys think that what I wrote was to "tell you awesome I am"... which is funny because it was nothing of the sort in fact everything I posted is extremely rudimentary and anyone in school for comp. sci. should feel they are on par with the knowledge I expressed in that post.

I was doing nothing more than relating to the OP and validating his feelings by letting him know that he is not alone and that I think almost everyone who goes to school for a technical degree feels the same way, that they don't actually learn much that they didn't already know or couldn't easily figure out for themselves quickly.

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I suppose that would be a good reason to be in that field to begin with

I just hate how things move very slowly, and like I said, I work at a law firm as an archives manager, but I do small-time computer fixes there, dealing with ppl very unskilled with technology. I've been there for 5 years and it's a good reference, flexible hours, good pay, great fuckin job. I feel like I've already got my foot half ass through the door and I'd essentially be doing the same thing at a helpdesk, only without the freedom I have now and + $11ty billion worth of debt.

In the end, I'd probably still be forced to go BACK to school to be happy working in the field and have enough income to live comfortably. I just wanted some feedback from people already on the wagon.

I suppose that would be a good reason to be in that field to begin with

I just hate how things move very slowly, and like I said, I work at a law firm as an archives manager, but I do small-time computer fixes there, dealing with ppl very unskilled with technology. I've been there for 5 years and it's a good reference, flexible hours, good pay, great fuckin job. I feel like I've already got my foot half ass through the door and I'd essentially be doing the same thing at a helpdesk, only without the freedom I have now and + $11ty billion worth of debt.

In the end, I'd probably still be forced to go BACK to school to be happy working in the field and have enough income to live comfortably. I just wanted some feedback from people already on the wagon.

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Well to get back to your question I would say that certs are the icing on the cake, an associates degree is the pan, a bachelors degree is the cake itself, and a masters/phd is like having one of those 4 little towers with another smaller cake on top lol, like a wedding cake lol.

You really need at least a bachelors, an associates is nothing and without the degree your certs won't mean much to most employers.